Commercial Water Damage

7/9/2019 (Permalink)

Last week was very hot and humid in the valley.  Many of us welcomed the heat as it was a far stretch from the long, cold winter we recently experienced.  It was a difficult winter and many homes and businesses suffered water losses due to the extreme weather we had.    

At the end of January, we were called to a furniture store.  They experienced a water loss when a pipe on an outside wall, associated with their sprinkler system, froze and burst.  Almost 4,000 square feet of showroom became wet as a result.  Floors, furniture, area rugs, some walls, all wet.

Our Project Manager Luke quickly arrived on site to assess the situation.  In his preliminary investigation he determined that the pipe was still detached or broken, but the water had been shut off at the source.    He also determined that power sources were limited.  He arranged for an electrician to come in and set up 3 power panels so that our crews would have enough power to run all the equipment (air movers & dehumidifiers) that were necessary to dry out such a large affected space.

Our crews arrived shortly after Luke.  While some team members began extracting water from the floors and furniture, other team members began blocking the furniture.  This is where we get furniture up on Styrofoam blocks.  This not only protects the furniture from sitting in water, but it also protects the flooring from any dyes that may leach out of the wet furniture. 

Some drywall was also wet.  To dry the drywall, we removed a couple hundred linear feet of baseboard.  Approximately 300 holes were drilled in the wall behind the baseboard.  This allowed air from our low-profile air movers to get up behind the drywall and properly dry it in place.  This is a big savings for the customer versus removing and replacing the wet drywall.  Once the walls are dry, the baseboard is put back up and the holes are covered leaving no evidence of the water damage.

In the end we placed approximately 53 air movers, 7 commercial size dehumidifiers, cleaned and saved approximately 400 pieces of furniture and took 28 area rugs back to our shop to be cleaned, deodorized and dried.  We had the affected area mostly dried out and back open to customers in less than 3 days.